Report for ACE2011 in Lisbon, Portugal
Conference name: 8th International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (ACE 2011 http://www.ace2011.org/) Date: 8-11 Nov 2011 Location: Lisbon, Portugal The conference lasted for four days with the first day being the workshops and tutorials, and the rest three days being a mix of paper sessions and poster/demo sessions. The conference has a sizable audience from all over the world, and provided a very good opportunity for us to meet with people and exchange research ideas. Almost everyone agrees that the best part of the conference is the opening keynote talk given by Professor Hiroshi Ishii from the MIT Media lab. The title of the talk is “The art of tangible bits and the vision of radical atoms”. Hiroshi Ishii is one of the most renowned professors in our field and is the pioneer of the research of tangible user interfaces. He proposed the idea of “tangible bits”, which seeks to “realize seamless interfaces between humans, digital information, and the physical environment by giving physical form to digital information, making bits directly manipulable and perceptible”. Recently he came up with a new vision of “radical atoms”, which is about our interaction with “future dynamic materials that are transformable, comformable and informable. In his talk, he explained his vision and showed the audience many of his previous works, including very early ones when he was in Japan as well as later ones at the MIT media lab. It is amazing how visionary and forward-thinking he is. His works at the 1990s were so advanced that resembles even some of today’s technology. And the legendary minority report gestural interface is actually based on his group’s work at the MIT. One of the attendees later commented, “usually researchers will go to science fiction for ideas, but science fiction went to them!” In the end, professor Ishii asked the question to the audience: “How do you want to be remembered by people living in 2200? What will you leave for them?”It was a very inspiring talk. There were also quite a number of interesting papers presented at the conference. For example, the PINGPONG++ introduced the concept of community contribution into the MIT Media lab’s previous work PINGPONG+, by developing API for creating new visualizations. VITA is a sound-power visualization system developed by students at the University of Tokyo. They cleverly used the piezoelectric effect to harvest power from the ultrasounic signal to light up LEDs. The working system in the video where many LEDs light up according to the direction of the ultrasonic sound looks really beautiful. There were also a few works from Japan related to comics/animation. For example, Takumi is a system to convert a real world video into cartoon-style, and E-IMPACT creates exaggerated illustrations in animation, and there was a poster about agumenting emotion by superimposing depiction in comics. The demo I liked most is the Anabiosis: An interactive pictorial art based on polychrome paper computing. I think it is a perfect combination of technology and art. When you touch the butterfly printed on the paper, its color changes. The color is very exquisite, detailed and natural. I’ve heard that all the technology as well as the design are done by the same student, which is really impressive. There is also an interesting demo of a robot (see pic). It is used to direct people. I really like the design of this robot. It has actually been used in some bank to direct the customers for two years already. It is a very good example how research results can be used in the real world. The was only one robot demoed at the conference, but actually there were several robots used at the bank. They will take turns to lead the way for the customers, and they will talk in some ‘robot language’ when they meet each other. It is really interesting. I also talked to people during the post session as well as other time about my research. Many people are interested in the idea and gave valuable feedbacks. Some suggested that we can also embed actuators inside, and it can be used for kids to easily make claymations. A few people were concerned about the feasibility and the accuracy of the RFID method. Our paper on food media was presented by Wei Jun and it was well received. People like the idea of printing actual food instead of having only virtual interactions.